Why Joaquin Phoenix Is More Likely to Play Lex Luthor Than You Think

I was hesitant to post something yesterday because it all seemed so tentative. Warner Bros. wants Joaquin Phoenix to play the main villain in Batman vs. Superman, and we assume it’s Luthor (with good reason – the Blu-ray for Man of Steel is loaded with references to Lexcorp, from whose files many of the extras are supposed to have been extracted).

…even if Warners offers Phoenix a role, it’s not clear he would accept as the actor has steered clear of big-budget pics in the past few years, leaning towards movies with a more prestige feel.

While that sounds about right for what we think we know about Phoenix, today’s LA Weekly features a cover story on Phoenix by my colleague Amy Nicholson, and she tipped me off to this part at the very end:

He saves his praise for the cast of the new Star Trek, a film he adores, calling their work “fucking brilliant.”

He insists, “It’s even more difficult to stand with a half-made, fake-ass fucking set with some weird fucking wig and say a bunch of technical dialogue and not have the benefit of people going, ‘Well, this is important work so let’s give it its space.’ Everyone’s going, ‘C’mon, jerk-off! Let’s do this!’?”

Maybe he’ll do a blockbuster like that someday. Maybe he won’t. “I love comedies and I love action movies,” he says. For now, he again feels like an actor who’s confident about his options.

So the good news is that this supposedly ultra-serious actor loves big action movies and sees them as a challenge. The bad news is he thinks Star Trek Into Darkness is an example of a brilliant one.